Portraits with backlit (shooting techniques)

I just wanted to share my experience I had with shooting portraits on the beach, during a sunny day. My conclusions could be summarized as following:

1. Without the flash, if the face is in the shade and exposed properly, usually the background (sky, sea) is overexposed and appears completely white.

2. If fill-flash is used (center-weighted metering), it helps a little bit, but still the background is way overexposed.

3. the best way I could think of is adjusting exposure compensation to -1 and flash compensation to +1. This way, everything that is affected by the flash (everything within couple of meters) is neutrally exposed, and everything else (background) is one step less exposed compared to the case when no exposure (and flash) compensation is used.

Since I'm beginning with DSLRs, I'm sure you'll have some other techniques to add to this.